No One You Know
A Novel
-
-
4.2 • 23 Ratings
-
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
Michelle Richmond dazzled readers and critics alike with her luminous novel The Year of Fog. Now Richmond returns with an intensely emotional, multilayered family drama—a woman’s search for her sister’s killer that spirals into a journey of secrets, revelations, and damaged lives.
All her life Ellie Enderlin had been known as Lila’s sister. Until one day, without warning, the shape of their family changed forever. Twenty years ago, Lila, a top math student at Stanford, was murdered in a crime that was never solved. In the aftermath of her sister’s death, Ellie entrusted her most intimate feelings to a man who turned the story into a bestselling true crime book—a book that both devastated her family and identified one of Lila’s professors as the killer.
Decades later, two Americans meet in a remote village in Nicaragua. Ellie is now a professional coffee buyer, an inveterate traveler and incapable of trust. Peter is a ruined academic. And their meeting is not by chance. As rain beats down on the steaming rooftops of the village, Peter leaves Ellie with a gift—the notebook that Lila carried everywhere, a piece of evidence not found with her body. Stunned, Ellie will return home to San Francisco to explore the mysteries of Lila’s notebook, filled with mathematical equations, and begin a search that has been waiting for her all these years. It will lead her to a hundred-year-old mathematical puzzle, to a lover no one knew Lila had, to the motives and fate of the man who profited from their family’s anguish—and to the deepest secrets even sisters keep from each other. As she connects with people whose lives unknowingly swirled around her own, Ellie will confront a series of startling revelations—from the eloquent truths of numbers to confessions of love, pain and loss.
A novel about the stories and lies that strangers, lovers and families tell—and the secrets we keep even from ourselves—Michelle Richmond’s new novel is a work of astonishing depth and beauty, at once heartbreaking, provocative, and impossible to put down.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Richmond (The Year of Fog) returns to San Francisco for another enjoyable blend of mystery and domestic fiction. Twenty years ago, Ellie Enderlin's sister, Lila, a mathematical prodigy, was murdered, and Andrew Thorpe, Ellie's English professor and a friend, exploited the family's grief with a true-crime bestseller that claimed Peter McConnell, Lila's married lover and colleague, was the killer. On a coffee-buying trip to Nicaragua, Ellie encounters McConnell, whose life was destroyed by Thorpe's conjecture. Sparked by this meeting, Ellie traces her way back through Lila's life and work, pursuing leads that the manipulative Thorpe abandoned when they did not fit his literary ambitions. Though many of Ellie's suspects lead her to dead ends, each gives her greater understanding of her sister, of mathematics and of herself. When she finally discovers the truth, Ellie's clarity about the past brings her new hope for the future. Vivid descriptions and loving explanations of the city and intelligent forays into the sciences of coffee and mathematics enhance Richmond's quietly captivating novel.
Customer Reviews
Beautiful book about the survivors
This book was gorgeous. And it is a different take on true crime. It shows how the survivors/family of someone who is murdered get through the experience, how it affects them, how it changes them.
Ellie's life is turned upside when her sister Lila disappears and then is discovered dead in the woods. Everything she thought was sound and whole in her life is broken and hollow. Her parents ofcourse are devastated and in their grief, they lose the part of their relationship that had once held them together. I recommend this book, I really enjoyed it.